Layin' It Out in Cold Type
A trio of new books make clear why right-wing politics must be thwarted and working-family interests respected.
By Roger M. Williams
The title of David Sirota's Hostile Takeover: How Big Money & Corruption Conquered Our Government — and How We Take It Back, leaves little to the imagination, and the contents back up everything he sets out to address. During George W. Bush's six-plus years as President, the federal government has blatantly allied itself with Big Business and the wealthy. Bush's hostility to working families, and the unions that represent millions of them, has been equally obvious and damaging.
Sirota, a journalist and political strategist, lays all that out in 10 chapters that focus on critical subject areas (e.g., Jobs, Pensions, Unions), and he talks plainly and [persuasively about each of them. (Sample — "The economics of the minimum wage make perfect sense. ... [It] gives a boost to people who are more likely to immediately spend the money on necessities, giving the economy a big job-creating shot in the arm.") He ends with no-nonsense prescriptions for how to end the "takeover," including "If your employer is paying you and your colleagues poorly, start a drive to unionize your workplace." Fifty-five pages of footnotes provide a wealth of information for further reading.
Crown Publishers; $24 in hardback
The same problem/solution approach characterizes The Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want — and What to Do About It, by Joan Blades (co-founder of MoveOn.Org) and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. The authors get your attention with an appalling but little-known fact: In most states, mothers can be denied a job, or given less pay for the same work, just because they are mothers. How's that for a society that professes to revere moms and, indeed, has turned their annual "day" each May into a national celebration.
And the differential is costly: "an average of $11,000 a year offered non-mothers ... for the same high-salaried job," according to Cornell University's Dr. Shelley Correll; mothers with comparable qualifications are also 44 percent less likely to be hired than their peers who have no children.
Nation Books publishers; original softcover about $10
In The Disposable American, Louis Uchitelle, a veteran economics writer for The New York Times, hammers home the grim truth that "involuntary separations" have become part of corporate strategy for boosting the bottom line. That policy, he notes, has reversed an understanding that prevailed for most of the 20th Century in American business: employees who worked diligently and well would not lose their jobs to the pursuit of higher company profits. Two reasons for this important change are the diminished power of unions and the rise of employment-at-will. The author's Rx: a federal government willing to curb "the unwinding of social value" stemming from corporate greed.
Alfred Knopf publishers; $29.95 in hardback
